- LC
AUGUST 23rd, 2009 - THE WICKHAM HOME FOR WAYWARD BOYS
Updated: May 22
Picture this. You’re a twelve-year-old boy in the 1920s, and you’re a bit of a troublemaker. You like throwing rocks at Model T’s, maybe, or you skip church on Sundays, or you refuse to eat the finger sandwiches at your mother’s fancy parties. Your parents have just about had enough of your shenanigans, so they ship you off to the Wickham Home for Wayward Boys in Hemlock, New Hampshire, where the Good Christians who run the joint help to reform you by sticking sharp objects in your palms and slapping posters around the school that bare your most shameful secrets to the world.
I mean, yikes. And you thought your middle school experience was hell.
The dark history of Wickham Home is certainly an unpleasant chapter in American history, but is it a weird one? Sources seem to indicate “yes.” Emily Wickham, the overseer of the boarding school, believed a hellgate existed in the basement. Rather than call a priest or, you know, find a new place to run her school, Emily became obsessed with this supposed hellgate. Her private journals reveal that she believed she could transform it into a gate to Heaven, but only through “reforming” the “wicked” boys who passed through her doors.
Hellgate or not, Emily’s methods were nothing short of child abuse, and most of the boys who entered Wickham Home never returned to their parents. Did they run away? Did they get sacrificed in one of Emily’s rituals? There were very few survivors, and their stories barely scrape the surface of the boarding school’s darker secrets.
Wickham Home has been abandoned for decades, and the small, peaceful town of Hemlock is doing its damnedest to forget about the place. But the occasional weird story emerges from time to time: namely, travelers to the area witnessing lights and sounds coming from inside the empty building, and the occasional paranormal investigator reporting chills, nausea, and hallucinations from spending too long inside the place.
Is Wickham Home haunted? Maybe, if you believe in ghosts. Or maybe there’s some kind of residue animating those ruins - a residue from the trauma inflicted within its walls. Tom and I were able to check the school out for ourselves, and while we may not have all the answers, we hope our investigation can shed a little light on the darkness that’s surrounded this cursed location for almost a century.
We’re the Weird Brothers, and this is our story.
* * * * *
If it were located anywhere else, Wickham Home might have taken the prize for “biggest eyesore in New England,” but the abandoned boarding school is well off the beaten path and out of the average person’s eyeshot. Probably for the best. The first thing Tom said to me when we arrived was “It looks like every shitty asylum in every shitty horror movie,” and you know, he has a point. There was something in those shattered windows and crumbling columns and bleak, imposing towers that just exuded shittiness, like Wickham Home had taken every gross cliche about abandoned buildings and draped them proudly over its broken frame.
Of course, Wickham Home looks like something out of a horror story because it was the setting for a horror story, once upon a time. Emily Wickham’s victims were ordinary kids, and she made them suffer just for behaving like kids do. I’ll admit, I was a bit irreverent earlier when talking about how she treated those boys, but nothing screams “irreverence” quite like inflicting pain on children and calling it “God’s love.”
I could tell from the second we saw Wickham Home that it wanted to be left alone. I’m not usually one to ascribe sentience to places, but there was something about the dark windows and the way the overgrown trees hugged the walls that made the whole building feel alive. Like a huge, lonely creature hibernating in the woods.
It felt wrong to disturb a creature like that. Of course, concepts like “wrong” or “technically illegal” have rarely stopped us before.
Tom got the camera rolling, and we headed inside. Our goal, like so many investigators before us, was to spend the night in Wickham Home. The rationale was that more time spent in a supernaturally charged location = more opportunities for supernatural stuff to manifest. It also meant there were plenty of opportunities for absolutely fucking nothing to happen, but that’s the risk you take in this line of work.
Even in its decrepit state, Wickham Home’s atrium earned an impressed whistle from me. The place was huge. Lichen-encrusted statues of various religious figures (some knocked over, some missing heads or limbs) lined the walls, surrounded by scraps of peeling golden wallpaper. The ceiling was high and arched, and a rusty, yet fully intact chandelier dangled from its center, swaying in the breeze coming through the shattered windows. This was the first room in the school that any visitors would see, and so naturally Emily had pulled out all the stops. How else would you convince Mom and Pops that they were leaving their son in good Christian hands?
The rest of the first floor was a maze of classrooms, bedrooms, dining halls and kitchens, and even a room full of pews that must have been a chapel at one point. The ceiling had collapsed, drowning most of the chapel in debris. Everywhere we went, we saw traces of Emily’s religious obsession: faded paintings of saints, crosses above doorways, even the odd Bible or two (which were more like slabs of mold that happened to resemble books). The stench of the place was gnarly, and I was glad Tom had suggested we bring face masks.
We had to be careful navigating the halls, since large chunks of the wooden floors had rotted away over the years, leaving gaping holes in the floor or soggy stretches of plank that threatened to swallow our shoes. There was still a bit of daylight left to guide us, but it was already gray and gloomy outside, and full dark would be here before long. We’d come equipped with flashlights and headlamps for the later stretches of the night.
“Check these out,” Tom said, when we were exploring a common area full of toppled chairs and tables. He pointed to a series of posters on the far wall. From a distance, they looked vaguely like WANTED posters, but it became clear as we approached them that the word at the top was TAINTED. Each one showed a black-and-white photo of a Wickham boy - some in their teens, some barely out of grade school - with a description of their “sin” underneath, followed by a bolded warning: DO NOT APPROACH.
We both agreed that the TAINTED posters were, to put it bluntly, pretty fucked up. I think they were our first reminder that we weren’t just here for some casual sightseeing. We were here to find out if the rage, the horror, and the sheer torment that had plagued the boys at Wickham Home had left a mark on the place.
The ground floor was in pretty poor shape, but some of the upstairs bedrooms had fared better, so we set up camp in one of them and rolled out our equipment. Tom and I believe in simple methods - no EVP meters, no spirit box, no spectral imaging cameras or whatever the latest trend in ghost hunting tech might be. I’m sure that stuff is fine and dandy, but Tom and I aren’t ghost hunters. We’re “weird” hunters. Interpret that however you’d like.
For this trip, we’d brought along a tape recorder, an ordinary camera, and this little doohickey that beeps whenever the temperature changes. So basically a thermometer. Our experience had taught us that the fancy gadgets didn’t get better results than the basic toolkit; they just looked nicer for primetime TV. We tend to notice the weird more with our naked eye, honestly. The camera is just there to prove it happened.
By the time the sun finally set, we hadn’t experienced any strange phenomena in Wickham Home. Nothing but mice in the floorboards and the occasional creak of the house settling. That didn’t prove anything, really; if every supposedly haunted location acted up whenever someone new popped in, paranormal investigators would be tenured professors, not reality show hosts. Wickham Home might give up its secrets tonight, or it might not. We’d pack up our things and leave in the morning either way.
“But Shaun,” you may be asking, “why would you be telling us all this if nothing happened?”
Ah, but you see, dear reader, something did happen that night.
It started with a scream.
* * * * *
Tom and I were exploring separate areas of the school when we heard it. I was investigating the attic, and to me, it sounded like a child’s wails of agony, coming right up through the floorboards. Tom was downstairs, poking around the kitchen with his flashlight and camera, and he heard more than just a scream of pain. He heard words: a woman’s voice, chanting in Latin, and a group of young boys shouting for her to “stop, please stop!”
The two of us ran into each other in the atrium. At this point it was roughly ten minutes to midnight. Tom seemed pretty shaken by what he’d heard, and even though the voices hadn’t come through on his camera, I could tell his fear was genuine. According to him, the screams and the chanting seemed to be coming from the basement - the only corner of Wickham Home we hadn’t yet explored.
As you all know, Tom and I are a plucky pair, but we also try not to take unnecessary risks in our investigations. We’d been putting off the basement as long as possible, mostly because we didn’t trust the foundations not to crumble right on top of us (plus, the mold was bound to be ten times worse in Wickham Home’s damp underbelly). But could we really stay away? Emily claimed she’d found a “hellgate” in the basement. Now we were hearing screams from down there. The basement was clearly a hotspot for whatever the hell was happening in Wickham Home, and we couldn’t ignore it now.
So down we went. The basement steps squealed and groaned the whole way, but at least they held our weight. The concrete floor at the bottom was covered in boxes, shelves, dust, mold, and way too much mouse poop, and the room was so huge that our flashlights could barely make out the far wall. I was all too aware that if anyone (or anything) was using this musty basement as a hideout, we’d just loudly announced our presence to them.
It didn’t take long for us to hear the voices again. No screaming this time - just a crowd of young children, their voices too low and distant to make out any words. Tom kept the camera rolling, and we followed the sounds to a hallway in the corner. This time he did manage to capture audio, which you can hear clearly in the video below:
The hall ended in a dark, narrow alcove, which seemed to wrap around a few corners into even darker stretches of the basement. Neither of us particularly wanted to squeeze in there, but we did want to capture some genuine evidence of the paranormal, and Wickham Home was being surprisingly generous. How could we turn back now?
Tom entered first, keeping the camera held high, while I followed with my flashlight. The whole time I kept a hand on my pocket. I brought a Swiss army knife on every investigation, mostly because it’s good to carry protection when you’re entering unfamiliar (and supernaturally active) territory. More than one reader has suggested we come packing heat, to which I tell those readers: sorry, folks, we’re allergic to guns.
“There’s something up ahead,” Tom said, once we’d rounded a few more corners. He was right. A strange glow glimmered from an unknown source about twenty feet away, casting refracted shadows on the walls. How was that possible? There was no electricity in Wickham Home - no reason we should be seeing light in a dark, abandoned basement around midnight.
Was there someone else down here?
I half-considered turning around (despite my earlier bravado) but Tom had already inched his way forward and around the next corner, right into the source of the glow. I gripped my pocket knife and followed.
I immediately felt an unpleasant prickle skitter up and down my body. The room we’d stepped into was much wider than the hallway, but instead of the crumbling brick and mortar we’d seen the whole way here, these walls were smooth, gray, and free of mold. The room looked modern, somehow. Like someone had started renovating the basement recently and abandoned the project. There was absolutely nothing in the space except a horizontal shard of floating light, which hung impossibly in front of us, like a bright sliver cut out of the air. The edges of the anomaly radiated intense colors: reds, blues, yellows and oranges, which flickered and faded and rippled outward in headache-inducing shimmers.
“What the hell is that thing?” I whispered.
It was as if the anomaly had been waiting for me to speak. The voices we’d heard before picked up again, louder than ever, and this time they were back to screaming, back to begging Miss Emily to stop it, please, just let them go! In the negative space around the light, two figures took shape: a teenage boy, skinny and shivering and shirtless, and a stooping woman in an old-fashioned dress. She was holding up the boy’s scrawny arm and dragging a knife through it, and the light we’d seen was spilling out of his open wound, gushing colors instead of blood. The invisible children around them screamed for their parents, for someone to come save them, but there was no one coming for them. They couldn’t do anything except hunker and cry and wait for their turn, for Emily Wickham’s knife to slice into them, for that horrible light to come bursting through their skin too.
The whole event lasted just a few seconds. Tom whispered “Jesus,” and the light show abruptly ended. The anomaly disappeared, something clattered to the floor, and the two of us wisely chose to get the fuck out of there. We clambered back the way we’d come, back into the basement, up the stairs, and out into the overgrown front yard of Wickham Home, where everything looked gray and dewy in the moonlight.
* * * * *
Tom and I eventually headed back inside to pack up our equipment (and don’t pooh-pooh us for stepping foot in there again. We’re on a tight budget, okay?). We waited until the sun came up, and then we did one last round of the upstairs and ground floor. Wickham Home, if it had any more secrets for us, chose to withhold them. Given the events of the past night, maybe that was for the best.
So what did we find in Wickham Home? That’s a tricky question. It seems that Emily Wickham and her victims still linger there, in some form or another - ghosts, echoes, who can say for sure? Tom and I have reviewed the history, we’ve reviewed our footage, but even after hours of caffeine-fueled speculation, we still have no idea what happened to us that night. Maybe someone else will have better luck figuring it out.
One thing we can say for sure: Wickham Home is weird, all right. Beyond the ghostly voices, beyond the anomalies in the basement, Wickham Home is a lonely place, and it didn’t like us being there. Maybe it’s ashamed of its own dark history. Or maybe, like Emily Wickham herself, the house is just wicked at its core - and we were lucky to survive the night.
See you all next time.
– The Weird Brothers
/gallowshill11
Comments